


It's Just That It's Delicate

by ohmyohpioneer



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 13:53:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2734997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyohpioneer/pseuds/ohmyohpioneer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hook asks a favor of the Crocodile, and his wish is granted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Just That It's Delicate

He’s not sure why this moment comes now of all the times that he could be bestowed such a kindness – a cleverly disguised curse. But as soon as he murmurs the words, as soon as the Crocodile tersely curls his lip in grim acquiescence, it’s done.

“I’m afraid, dearie,” he mocks, “that like many of these transfigurative spells, you’ve only till this time tomorrow to do whatever it is you wish to do.”

He flexes and bends and studies the sinews of his left hand. It is scarred and new and a fleshy relic of a him many lifetimes removed.

"Aye."

And he wishes that maybe he had never wished at all.

\---- 

He runs his hand along the rail of the pier. Notes the way the knots tangle and slow the path of his fingertips. All grain and slivered memories.

The phantom limb had long since blinked from existence, and whatever his hand is to him now, it’s not a hand (it’s not a hook). 

It’s a bow to weakness; it’s an admission of failure; it’s erasure of pain (aches and deep soul pangs he’s overcome and defeated and wrestled and grappled and-)

But he is  _whole_ , and that’s what she deserves.

It’s strange, he thinks as he raps his knuckles on the bend where wood meets wood to point to the far corners of a sea he knows nothing of, that bone and flesh might make this right (whatever  _this_  is with Swan) when it was an apparition he spent a year forgetting (chasing).

\---

She’s studiously punching away at the small device locked in her grasp when he enters the dining room. The steady movement of two hands with slender fingers and practiced patterns is the affirmation he needs before he moves to sit across from her. 

And when he places his palms face up (in ashamed happiness, in supplication) on the table between them, she simply stares. 

“Killian?” 

There is wonder there, and the swelling of his heart has his left hand curling and clutching at air. 

(For a moment he is returned to his first incarnation, and he is a lorn boy with wild dreams of whitecapped expanses.)

“What do you think, then?”

“I-” she charts a shaky course from heel to thumb, tripping lightly down valleys and over calloused ridges, edging the marred rises of each knuckle. “ _How?_ ”

Both of her hands rest gently on his. It’s tentative, a gesture of question more than anything else. He is sure his left hand (and his right, too), has never felt anything quite so immeasurable as the embered curl of Emma Swan’s grasp.

His smile is jagged, but his hands are aching softness. “Magic.”

(He’s a ruined man with wild dreams of honeyed seas of curls laced about two hands and lips set asunder in squalls of maddening, rushing currents.) 

\---

He’s not sure why, in the end, he assaulted the Knave.

All he can piece together is that he was suspended in someone else’s life, he was whole and normal (if only for a brief moment in time), and the Queen of Hearts’ former peon had taken that from him.

Emma had laughed and talked and sighed and smiled and  _been his_  and he had  _been_   _hers_ (in a way he never could have been and never would be again).

But. 

Hands, hearts, moments, promises; they all break in the end.

\---

When the Crocodile wakes him from his shallow slumber, he stumbles his way down to the gray collision of water and turf.

(He remembers those eddied hours as the curse edged purple in the sky for a second time, consuming greedily the Enchanted Forest. Remembers the drunken haze as he watched ships dot the horizon, remembers the defeated, inebriated revelry of his crew as they accepted their fate once more.  _Drink to the devil, drink to the sea._  He’d considered his hook, the way it gleamed in the island-soaked rays, then dropped it in the sand and abandoned a self he’d long since lost. 

And this, too, is a self he’s squandered.) 

He braces himself with his left hand in the sand and lets the grit and salt sink into his bones as he seats himself facing the East. Sunrise will be soon, and if he can be whole for only a few more hours, he would like to be whole in the yawning face of the ocean as the ebbing waters slip from the shore.

(If he could remake his wish, he would wish that he could be whole  _with_ her and _for_  her only.

All magic comes with a price.)

\--- 

The line of surf and sky is just blushing pink when she sits at his side (his left side).

There is quiet that the rumble of the tide cannot drown, and the strange sensation of  _tears_  is clawing the back of his throat.

But she pulls his hand into her own, rubs her thumb at the raw-red of his knuckles, and he knows whatever words are about to tumble from her lips are more than he will ever deserve. 

“Killian,” she’s looking down at their fingers in and around and so warm against one another, “I can’t even begin to imagine how you feel.”

She’s doesn't speak for a moment and she brings her other hand to trace gentle patterns over where his left hand and her right are locked together. (He can barely make out the silhouette in the murky dawn.)

“But I know how you  _shouldn’t_ feel,” and then she lets it go – releases the skin and sinews and newness (that from so, so long ago).  “This isn’t – this doesn’t make you whole or  _right_  or  _better_ …”

She’s silent and it’s just crashing and roaring and the ocean for a gasping moment.

When she does speak, it’s sandy. “I think that…when you feel like you’re missing something, when you feel like there’s this, this,  _hole_  in you,” she swallows around the roughness. “I think that you think you can just find this missing thing, this  _object_  and you’ll be okay, you know?”

(Her words are washing and saturating him and he can feel every last nerve in his left hand.)

“You finally have what you’ve been missing and you’re not pieces anymore –you’re a  _person,_ ” she scratches at her thumb. “But that’s not how it works.”

Now his eyes burn and he wants her to hold his hand again, to make this okay.

Finally she turns to meet his gaze, a fierce resignation there. “ _Things_  can’t fix you, Killian.”

She places her mouth against the back of his hand, lets her lips move against the tender skin there, the rings he’d used to disguise its conspicuousness. “Being broken...if there’s anything I’ve learned in the past year, it’s that  _you’re_  the only one who can fix you,” her voice is sympathy, blanketing him. “It  _sucks._ ”

Her laugh is wet with unshed pain, but he can’t help the quirk at the corner of his mouth or the swelling affection he feels for this gorgeous (fractured) woman. 

“But Killian, you aren’t alone,” her eyelashes flutter downward, “You know that right?”

He clears his throat of the hurt (doubt, self-reproach) that is lingering, “Aye.”

“Your hand,” she squeezes lightly, “it doesn’t  _make_  you.”

They don’t exchange any more words as she buries her face against the leather of his new jacket and breathes deep at the juncture of his neck and shoulder and he feels the pull of the tide somewhere deep. He memorizes every press of Swan’s skin and bones and delicate fingers and hopes that when this is gone in just a few hours, that will be enough.

(And when his hand fades, Swan’s remains.)


End file.
